Music: End of a Revolutionary

Sergei Prokofiev was an established musical revolutionary of 26 when the Bolsheviks spread flame and famine across Russia in 1917. He had outjangled Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in his pagan Scythian Suite, startled St. Petersburg’s musical society with the thudding energy of his piano pieces. When he wanted to—as he showed in his Classical Symphony —he could write with sweet simplicity. But he seldom cared to prove it. “I believe,” he wrote, “that it is a mistake to favor musical simplification.”

But Prokofiev, the son of the manager of a large estate, was no political revolutionary. In 1918 he got himself a passport and took off across Siberia and the Pacific for the U.S. For the next 15 years he was a free-footed citizen of the world—composing operas (his Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago in 1921), ballets (he collaborated with Paris’ famed Impresario Serge Diaghilev for 15 years) and piano concertos which he himself triumphantly played on tour. At 40, he ranked with Strauss, Stravinsky and Schoenberg as one of the world’s most challenging composers.

Home to Hot Water. Russia followed his career proudly, acclaimed each new success and feted him when he went home for a brief visit in 1927. By 1933, he was ready to go home for good. The Soviet government provided him, as it does all major composers, with a steady income plus room & board.

Musical life in the Soviet Union was complex. As early as 1936, Prokofiev was slapped on the wrist for composing in too “urbanized” a manner. He corrected this by drawing on popular subjects, and casting them in heroic molds, as he did in his huge score for the film Alexander Nevsky. But, along with six other composers, including Shostakovich and Khachaturian, he was in hot water again in 1948, when the Communist commissars complained that his music was too full of “formalism” —i.e., it was too tricky for the Soviet public to understand easily—and that he should compose with more “realism.” And when he failed to correct his “errors” quickly enough, his opera, Story of a Real Man, drew a sharp, critical blast from Izvestia. It was not until 1951 that he won another Stalin prize.

“Soul or Something.” A man little given to speeches, Prokofiev once offhandedly said that his Fifth Symphony was “about the spirit of man—his soul or something like that.” But his music spoke for itself: there is hardly an orchestra in the West that has not played some of his seven symphonies or his eight concertos; his piano pieces are standards on recital programs, and his musical playlet, Peter and the Wolf, is a happy classic with U.S. children.

In recent years, his health was poor, but he continued to write music. He was no longer the daring musical revolutionary, but his “realistic” Seventh Symphony (first performed last month) and his 1951 oratorio, On Guard for Peace, put him firmly back in the graces of the Kremlin. Last week, as Joseph Stalin lay unconscious, cerebral hemorrhage brought death to Sergei Prokofiev at 61. In a Moscow all but preoccupied with the death of the dictator, thousands filed into Composers Hall, where his body lay in state, to pay a tribute to the Soviet Union’s finest composer.